Nontransferable and well-paid leave for fathers would go a long way toward addressing parental roles and inequities.

One way of addressing this is to look to countries like Sweden, Norway and Canada for lessons on how parental leave policies have been used to encourage changing gender relations around paid work and providing care. These are policies that recognize and build on the constant interplay between gender equality and gender differences.

In Sweden and Norway, there has been a significant shift away from the “male breadwinner/ female caregiver model” of work and family. This occurred partly through respecting a long-standing practice of long maternity leaves for women combined with affordable, accessible and high-quality child care; to this, they added parental leave policies designed to encourage men to be involved in early child care. One of the rationales for the latter was that getting fathers into the home would help to disrupt a deeply rooted pattern and social norm of women as primary care-giving experts and men as main breadwinners.

Change did not happen quickly. Indeed, it took decades. In 1980, only 5 percent of Swedish fathers took parental leave; 10 years later, it was just 7 percent. It was only when nontransferable and well-paid leave for fathers (also referred to as the “daddy month”) was introduced in 1996 that uptake quickly rose to 77 percent. A second “daddy month” was implemented in 2002 and the numbers have risen to above 90 percent. A similar story plays out in neighboring Norway and in one province of Canada.

For the past decade, most Canadian men and women have had the option to share up to 35 weeks of paid parental leave entitlement (which is an add-on to 15 weeks of maternity leave). While numbers of fathers taking leave initially surged upwards (from 3 percent to 10 percent in just one year), men’s uptake of parental leave has remained at about 12 percent. When the province of Quebec added three to five weeks of nontransferable paternity leave, it quickly translated into 82 percent of Quebecois dads taking this leave. As in Norway and Sweden, results are related to the establishment of paid paternity leave, but they also followed a decade-long initiative and discussion on men and parental leave.

In the case of Germany, these policies and conversations about men and parenting are still in their infancy. While The International Herald Tribune article points to a “battery of policy measures,” some of these have been in place for less than five years.

A more optimistic view of Germany comes from Daniel Erler in a recent collection on “The Politics of Parental Leave Policies.” Mr. Erler argues that paternity leave is Germany’s first family policy that “unambiguously aims at reducing female career interruptions and increasing men’s involvement in the child rearing domain.” Fathers’ parental leave rates have, in fact, quadrupled in Germany (from 3.3 percent in 2006 to 15.4 percent in 2008). According to Mr. Erler, this and other recent family policy measures represent a “decisive departure from West Germany’s male breadwinner model.”

Parental leave is not gender “equal” in any of these countries. But taking fathers into account is symbolically and practically important. It represents both an ideological and policy-based shift in the assumptions around who does paid work and who does child-rearing and housework.